Eleven Great Books Are Available Here:
Our Deadly Flaw stands out for its originality, gentle humor, and precision of language. It’s three books in one: a self-help manual, a counter-extremism manifesto, and an inspiration and empowerment for saving our planet. It provides an especially clear explanation of the dynamics that govern our inner life. Our deadly flaw refers not only to the pervasiveness of inner conflict in the human psyche, but also to our unconscious compulsion to replay and recycle that conflict in numerous self-defeating ways. This book is Peter’s latest, published in 2022. It provides hundreds of examples of how unrecognized inner conflict and the symptoms it unleashes damage us individually and cause major dysfunction in social, political, and economic life.
Purchase Our Deadly Flaw: Paperback / E-book
Why We Suffer brings into clear focus a largely unrecognized compulsion in human nature, which is to indulge in emotional suffering and even to seek it out. This flaw in our emotional operating system is a grave danger to each of us personally and to all of us collectively. Through our defense system, we cover up awareness of our unconscious tendency to replay and recycle unresolved negative emotions. This flaw in our human nature gets the best of us only if we fail to become conscious of it. When we expose this inner condition, we are beginning to overcome and resolve it. When it no longer contaminates our inner life, we feel, just for starters, our goodness and our value more acutely, and we are now free to fulfill our aspirations and live in inner harmony.
Purchase Why We Suffer: Paperback / E-book
The Phantom of the Psyche uncovers inner passivity, which is a common characteristic of the human psyche. This passivity distorts our sense of self and binds us to a second-hand experience of ourselves. This psychological condition, which affects men and women equally, is much more than just our difficulty in standing up for our rights. It is a complex and mysterious aspect of our psyche, concealed beneath our feelings of being helpless, doubtful, overwhelmed, and indecisive. Inner passivity also contributes to feelings of being defective or unworthy, and it is a factor in hundreds of symptoms, including anxiety, fear, anger, addictions, compulsions, procrastination, panic attacks, and depression. Our growing awareness of this aspect of our psyche produces inner freedom, enhanced self-confidence and peace of mind.
Purchase Phantom of the Psyche: Paperback / E-book
Freedom from Self-Sabotage is a powerful book that exposes the invisible inner saboteur that lurks behind our defeat and failure. This book shows how we resist and reject the positive, how we collude in creating our problems, and how we cover up awareness of these hidden dynamics through our defense system. Core questions are addressed: Why is the negative there in the first place? Why do we find it so difficult to do what’s in our best interest? Why don’t we exercise more, eat better, stay focused, worry less, remain positive, keep friends, save money, hold on to love, and achieve more with our creativity and skills? This book identifies in detail the unresolved negative emotions that block and hinder us, and it provides scores of examples of the hidden ways we sabotage ourselves through our entanglement in feelings of being deprived, refused, controlled, criticized, and rejected.
Purchase Freedom From Self-Sabotage: Paperback / E-book
Secret Attachments delivers the keys to recovery from addictions through a powerful new awareness of the nature of negative emotions. We now can see clearly how unresolved negative emotions are directly related to out-of-control behaviors with food, drugs, alcohol, sex, and gambling.
Addictive personalities are unconsciously determined to go on experiencing negative emotions that are unresolved from their past. These emotions constitute unconscious or secret attachments, meaning they are like emotional addictions. Secret attachments produce passivity, helplessness, bitterness, cynicism, self-rejection, apathy, and even self-hatred. These attachments weaken us and undermine our capacity for self-regulation.
Purchase Secret Attachments: Paperback / E-book
See Your Way to Self-Esteem uncovers the surprisingly strong tendency we have to see other people and the world from a negative perspective. More than we realize, our emotions determine how we see things, what we see, and what we do not see.
If we’re bored, we see with eyes that are listless and dull; if we’re angry, we see things to be angry about; if we’re envious, we see what fuels feelings of envy. We’re unconsciously interested in “seeing” how we are allegedly being deprived, refused, belittled, helpless, or opposed in some manner. We can be especially willing to “see” others as if they are seeing us in a negative light. This book offers a therapeutic approach that attacks the root causes of negative and self-defeating beliefs.
Purchase See Your Way to Self-Esteem: Paperback / E-book
Psyched Up is a work of artful communication that takes profound and vital self-knowledge from depth psychology and makes it comprehensible and easy to assimilate.
Though we might be smart and well-educated, often all we encounter when we look inward is a fuzzy obscure uncertainty. This book, consisting of blog posts organized under seven themes, explains the deeper dynamics at the heart of emotional and behavioral difficulties.
We learn, for instance, why we can quickly become angry, depressed, or discouraged when facing life’s challenges. Why do we fail to be at our best when a stellar effort is needed? Why do we experience so much of life in a negative rather than in a positive way? These topics and many others are addressed in detail as they apply to specific emotional and behavioral problems, including anger, depression, anxiety, loneliness, addictions, guilt and shame, stress and worry, and feelings of helplessness.
Purchase Psyched Up: Paperback / E-book
Who’s Afraid of Inner Truth? comprises 74 articles that uncover inner truth as it applies to the dynamics of our emotional life. These articles are dispatches in the journalistic tradition, reports from our psyche’s underworld. Our psyche is a war zone where primitive forces and instincts involving aggression, passivity, egotism, resistance, defenses, and irrationality clash with conflicting agendas. Just about everyone is a casualty, to some degree, of this inner conflict. We can establish inner peace when we assimilate this knowledge. New material has been added to this book that hasn’t appeared on this website, and the writing has been crafted to communicate the ideas and knowledge as effectively as possible.
Purchase Who’s Afraid of Inner Truth?: Paperback / E-Book
Books by psychotherapist Sandra Michaelson (1944-1999):
LoveSmart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns that Sabotage Relationships demonstrates through theory, examples, and exercises how our unconscious interpretations and beliefs can adversely affect our relationships. We see how we unwittingly avoid recognition of our participation in relationship failure, while making our partner, loved ones, and friends largely responsible for our negative feelings and self-defeating behaviors. More specific topics include: why we choose our partner; the meaning of the begging-bowl syndrome; the origins of control issues and what we can do about them; the clear difference between genuine love and addictive attachments; how sexual issues reflect our emotional conflicts; the tendency to compulsively repeat self-sabotaging patterns of behavior; and the illusion of reforming our partner.
Purchase LoveSmart: Paperback / E-book
The Emotional Catering Service is a metaphor for what is commonly known as codependency. This book takes a totally new approach to codependency. It uncovers the roots of the problem, which are unresolved emotional attachments to self-denial, rejection, unworthiness, and feeling helpless and controlled. Deep knowledge from within our psyche is uncovered, and this new self-awareness provides readers with the best insight for change and growth.
This book examines the six major features of emotional catering. These features represent everyday attitudes and behavioral problems that plague many “normal” people to some degree, sabotaging prospects for health and happiness. The six features are: self-denial, fear and avoidance of intimacy, obsessive investment in the welfare of others, compulsive seeking of approval, taking responsibility for others and doing it all, and passive stance toward life. Each of these features is examined in depth throughout the book.
Purchase The Emotional Catering Service: Paperback / E-book
Is Anyone Listening? reveals rules and insights that guide you in communicating more successfully with your partner, as well as with friends, family members, and even strangers. The essence of this book’s communication program involves learning how to feel genuine interest, as well as compassion, without being judgmental or reactive.
Discover the dozens of ways we block communication and what we can do to change these unconscious ineffective patterns. This book is designed to help readers see and understand communication patterns. It gives you tools that help you overcome the fear of expressing yourself honestly and directly. Discover insight into our instinctive readiness to act defensively and inappropriately with our partner. Learn why defensive reactions are so common, and what they reveal about our issues on a deeper level. Resolve once and for all the fear that arises when it’s time to be honest with ourselves and our partner.
Purchase Is Anyone Listening?: Paperback / E-book
